Almost
60 years ago, at the end of World War II, an American journalist in London
asked George Bernard Shaw what he foresaw as the future of the victorious
Allies – in particular, the United States.

“Three
hundred years of the Dark Ages,” Shaw answered promptly. “After that, things
will be fine.”

I wish I could believe him,
not that it matters -- by the time enlightenment hits these shores again,
I’ll have shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the Lord at that great
big Super Bowl in the sky. As Texas writer Beth Henry remarked last week on
the media website Axis
of Logic, “Things have gotten really creepy in the land of the Humvee.”

A confession: Unless I’m
badly mistaken, I’m the only person living who’s never watched the Super
Bowl here on earth. I’ve never willingly watched a football game at all, so
I missed the colossal misdeed, the unspeakable act, the crude, tasteless,
anti-Christian, anti-American, anti-family “wardrobe malfunction” that gave
an estimated 99 million TV viewers, among them helpless women and children,
a 1.7-second glimpse of Janet Jackson’s nickel-plated breast.

"Like millions of
Americans," said an enraged Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal
Communications Commission, "my family and I gathered around the television
for a celebration. Instead, that celebration was tainted by a classless,
crass and deplorable stunt."

It took Powell less than 24
hours to order an investigation – the Feds can move quickly if they want to
-- but help came too late for many of the victims. In Virginia, Republican
congressman J. Randy Forbes was watching Super Bowl XXXVIII in a hospital
room with his “seriously ill 79-year-old-father” when Jackson’s teat hit the
screen.

"I felt like they robbed us
of a very special moment," said Forbes, calling the prime-time display
"irresponsible and reprehensible." Even so, Forbes was luckier than Vivian
Mitchell of Modesto, California, who was scheduled to testify at the Scott
Peterson murder trial, if it ever begins, but who had a stroke in front of
her television on Super Bowl Sunday and died three days later. Mitchell was
the only person Peterson’s attorneys could find who claimed to have seen
Laci Peterson, pregnant and alive, on the day that Scott supposedly axed
her. And so another innocent life has been lost to tragedy – and for what?

"It's been a rough week on
everybody," said Justin Timberlake at Sunday night’s Grammy Awards. With
Jackson, Timberlake is the man who perpetrated this national outrage, and
while he claims, even now, that “what occurred was unintentional,” it
plainly was not. This doesn’t matter either, I suppose, in the depths of
Timberlake’s twisted mind. The guilty parties have both apologized, you see,
and that’s all you need to do in this country to be let off the hook. Just
say you’ve “misjudged” something and they’ll lap you up like mother’s milk,
forgive the expression.

It’s hard to know, of
course, at this very early stage, if the sight of Janet Jackson’s dexter
mammary posed an “imminent” threat to public morality and the American way
of life, or if it was merely “urgent,” “immediate,” “serious,” “mortal” and
“mounting.” Like George W. Bush, “I don’t want to get into word contests,”
and it may be that the intelligence I received about Super Bowl Sunday
wasn’t so “darned good” after all. Certainly, no nipple has yet been found,
despite the best efforts of federal inspectors and the endless replaying of
this gross indecency from the moment it occurred.

Indeed, if it weren’t for
television, I would never have known that Janet Jackson has breasts, much
less that a member of the Jackson family has parts of her anatomy that are
apparently real. I wouldn’t have seen the willful and malicious destruction
of Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, either, engineered by the broadcast
networks’ incessant repeats of “The Scream,” which aired a whopping 633
times in the four days after the Iowa caucuses.

Here, the mind begins to
boggle. Without TV and its attendant publicity, I’d be blissfully unaware of
Laci Peterson. I would never have heard of Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears,
Beyoncé, the savagely murdered Carlie Brucia in Florida or that little girl
in Pittsburgh, Brandy McKenith, who last week, at the age of seven, was
suspended from school for saying the word “hell.”

To be precise –- because
American reporters value nothing so much as objectivity in the news --
Brandy was expelled from Pittsburgh’s Sunnyside Elementary School for
telling a classmate that he was going to hell, after she heard him utter a
phrase she considers blasphemous, “I swear to God.” The Pittsburgh public
school system has zero tolerance for “profanity,” according to news reports;
while profanity isn’t defined in its “student code of conduct,” it’s
forbidden, all the same, so Brandy was sent home with a scarlet “H” on her
back.

“'Hell?'” said Brandy’s
father, Wayne. “She got suspended for that? 'Hell' is, like, the least of
the words in school today.” What’s more, Brandy learned it in church. The McKeniths aren’t “religious fanatics,” says Wayne, but they have “a healthy
respect for the Lord. She’s under the assumption that good people go to
heaven and bad people go to hell.”

And why wouldn’t she be? TV
is how children learn these days, and now that Brandy’s home alone she’ll
have lots of time to watch. Thank God for President Bush, is all I can say,
who declared last week at the 52nd Annual Presidential Prayer Breakfast in
Washington, "Let us never be too proud to acknowledge our dependence on
Providence and take our cares to God.”